Dr. John Christy testified this week before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. He noted that during the heat wave of late June and early July, high temperature extremes became major news. Headlines that said “This is what Global Warming looks like,” Christy said, were not based on climate science. He said that “it is scientifically more accurate to say that this is what Mother Nature looks like.” Dr. Christy is one of our most outstanding climatologists.

While folks in the East and Midwest were suffering from the heat, it was chilly here. I was still sleeping under a down comforter with temperatures in the 50s and low 60s, and even colder at night. Today it is 83°, mid-afternoon in August, and the first two days over 80° this year. There wasn’t any significant local strawberry crop, they were moldy. Anecdotal evidence, to be sure.

I am a pure amateur with an interest in the global warming controversy. But I have long agreed with Dr. Christy. Mother Nature does many strange things with the weather, many not well understood. Doesn’t mean the earth is in crisis. CO2 is plant food and we need it to feed ourselves and the world, and stupid alarmist attempts to suppress carbon dioxide are a waste of time and effort, not to mention money. Dr. Christy’s written testimony is here. It includes much that is not in the video. Worth your time.

Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is the chairman of the Senate committee on Environment and Public Works. Her smarmy response to Senator Jeff Sessions'(R-AL) introduction of Dr. Christy,(designed to point out that he is a noted climatologist with an outstanding reputation, and his testimony is meaningful). In the current political climate, it seems one must point out these things.

The oddity seems to be that Democrats increasingly reject Republican statements, information or testimony — because it comes from a Republican. They have their opinions, their ideas, and they bear no relation to the real world. They are informed by Liberal opinion, and increasingly get way off because they are impervious to fact. I don’t think they read books if they are by a known Republican author or columns by a conservative writer. They hate Conservatives, largely because we have the nerve to disagree with them.

Evidence; they consider the Tea Party to be a radical, dangerous, racist movement. Health and Human Services has them on a watch list as potential terrorists. These are the ordinary folks whose most radical actions have been to carry signs, listen to and make speeches at rallies, and clean up after themselves when they have had a rally. The presence of black leaders and\ members does nothing to allay the claims of racism for any black person attending a Tea Party rally is by definition an Uncle Tom.

The Occupy movement, on the other hand, was what young America looked like, protesting the evils of Wall Street. Soon the protests would go national, and would bring about the revolution, and the Left would triumph. The rapes, molestation, drugs and murders didn’t seem to trouble them — that was just Republican propaganda. It did get a little uncomfortable and talk about the Occupy movement dropped off after the videos of vandalism and destruction in progress surfaced.

This seems to be what is going on in the climate change field. The left believes in alarmist global warming— period. Al Gore, noted climatologist, told them so. Even as countries all over the world are eliminating their subsidies for wind and solar, the left continues to support alternative energy. It does not matter if the first few projects fail, the sun is there and it’s free and sooner or later it will work, and we can power the world “naturally”— or is it organically. Nevermind. The sun does not shine at night, and we haven’t figured out how to store the diffuse energy nor dispense with annoying clouds, Forward! into a brighter and much more expensive future. And besides, those big meetings in the world’s resort spots are really fun, and somebody else pays for them.

The divide keeps growing larger because liberals don’t look at all knowledge or information, impartially, but only at “liberal” facts. Keynesian economics, they believe, got us through the Great Depression (see the work of economists Lee Ohanian and Harold Cole from UCLA) thus Keynesian economics must be correct.

Scientific skeptics (and scientists are supposed to be skeptics) produce evidence that the earth has been gradually cooling for centuries and the current warming is nothing to get excited about, and such a notion is rejected out-of-hand. Produce evidence that temperature anomalies because of improper siting of thermometer stations, has caused evidence of warmer temperatures that exist in reality— you must be kidding and Anthony Watts is called names.

Barbara Boxer’s properly leftist professor Christopher Feld, a lead author of the IPCC’s Working Group II, testified to the committee. Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. demolishes his testimony promptly.

The politicization of climate science is so complete that the lead author of the IPCC’s Working Group II on climate impacts feels comfortable presenting testimony to the US Congress that fundamentally misrepresents what the IPCC has concluded. I am referring to testimony given today by Christopher Field, a professor at Stanford, to the US Senate.

This is not a particularly nuanced or complex issue. What Field says the IPCC says is blatantly wrong, often 180 degrees wrong. It is one thing to disagree about scientific questions, but it is altogether different to fundamentally misrepresent an IPCC report to the US Congress. Below are five instances in which Field’s testimony today completely and unambiguously misrepresented IPCC findings to the Senate. Field’s testimony is here in PDF.

Dr. Roger Pilke Jr. explains on his blog, just what he found wrong in Professor Feld’s testimony. It’s pretty interesting to see the politicization and the improbable arguments. Interesting and sad.

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Dr. Christy testifying before the Senate is what self-importance looks like. Seriously, aside from phrenologists, was there ever a branch of science that has less to contribute to the benefit of the human condition than climatology? Oh, but caste themselves as prophets of the coming DOOOOOOOOM! and suddenly they have to turn away grants. It’s a nice racket.